


Dirt

by GulJeri



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Rape, Storm - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-12 18:07:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5675518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GulJeri/pseuds/GulJeri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As a child Garak sees Tain hurting his mother and comes to a very hard realization.<br/>TW: rape non explicit</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dirt

The servant quarters were quiet as Garak lay in the dark trying to sleep. He was a tiny form huddled beneath the covers, belly full from dinner. Mila wasn’t the best cook, but she was generous with portions, and it was rather obvious that she kept her son well fed.

Garak pinched the pudgy bit beneath his chin, and then his belly, considering how the other children teased him for being short, tubby, and slow. Mila said that he would grow taller one day, and they had begun, at Garak’s request, a record of his height against the doorframe to his room. He had Mila check every day, and make a mark on the door frame above his head, but he hadn’t grown at all since they’d began, and that had been several months ago.

Garak crawled out of bed and tiptoed to the door, and stood with his back to the doorframe. After a moment of hesitation, Garak pushed himself up onto his toes, and slid hand to the top of his head as a place marker, then turned around keeping his hand where it was so he could see ‘how tall he was’. Of course standing on his toes was cheating, but Uncle Tain encouraged him to practice lying, so why not?

He grabbed a marker from a cluttered little table that was near the door, and made a little mark where the lie was. He knew he hadn’t really grown any taller of course, but seeing the new mark hovering a bit higher than the old one pleased him.

Garak turned when his room lit up with a brief flash of light. He hurried to the window, and peeked out from between the curtains.

His window overlooked Tain’s gardens, which his father tended, and Garak often helped his father with the plants. Tolan taught him about growing things, now and then slipping in little things regarding the old religious ways. As far as Garak knew, there weren’t many Cardassians who still practiced them. But his father even had a prayer mask, and told Garak that one day it would be his. Somehow that made Garak feel uncomfortable.

The room lit again.

Past the gardens and perfectly maintained land upon which Tain’s home sat, the desert began to sprawl. From the opposite end of the house there was a nice view of Cardassia City, but from this side the desert stretched out and out and out with just a fringe of misty gray mountains against the very distant horizon. Tonight there was a storm forming over the desert. Now and then bolts of lightning would dance between the angry looking thunderheads.

Garak slid the tip of his tongue between his lips. He could taste the way the air felt charged with electricity, and it smelled strongly of impending rain. The last few days had been uncharacteristically humid. Cardassia, or at least the part that Garak and his family inhabited, was usually an arid place.

Garak’s small hands tensed, and they gripped the window sill, as the bolts flashed and thunder growled and grumbled.

He glanced towards Tain’s house, ‘the big house’ as he called it, noting that all the lights were off. Usually Tain didn’t go to bed so early.

Garak startled when large drops of rain suddenly began to ratchet against the window.

How was he going to be able to sleep with all this noise?

The thunder continued, and the rain hammered, while Garak retreated to his bed and sat in the dark boredly running the days events over in his mind.

But very soon he heard something else behind the storm. There were more bangs, and bumps, and they were too near to be thunder. Garak’s throat closed up when he thought he heard his mother crying out. The end of the noise was cut off by a crack of thunder, but Garak knew he had heard it, and he left his room as quickly as he could and hurried to her room.

Mila and Tolan slept in separate rooms, and Garak had never thought this strange of his mother and father. He assumed that all parents kept the same arrangement.

He pushed his mothers’ bedroom door opened a bit, but he was horrified at what he saw, and simply stood there in a slender beam of light, frozen and unable to help, or to look away.

Thick gray hands held her wrists above her head. Her dress was hiked up. He was there between her thighs.

_You’ll wake the boy with your noise—I told you to be silent! You should know by now that this is what you owe to me, servant._

_I’ll leave! I’ll take Elim, and I’ll leave!_

_And where would you go, Mila? I can make it so you and Tolan wouldn’t be hired anywhere in the Union, not even to clean toilets. Do you forget who I am?_

She began to cry, and that snapped Garak out of his shocked stupor. He may have been a slow child, but fear for his mothers’ safety made him quick.

“Father! Father!” Garak burst into Tolan’s room and tugged at his hand. The other Cardassian was laying on his bed, on his side, staring numbly into the darkness. The lightening flashed and lit his face. Tolan was cradling his prayer mask close to his chest, and when the lightning came, deep shadows were left in the hollowed eye sockets and mouth.

“Father you have to come! He’s hurting her!” Garak attempted to drag his father out of bed.

“Go to bed, Elim,” Tolan said hollowly.

“He’s hurting her, he’s hurting her!” Garak shouted through his tears.

“There is nothing we can do,” Tolan said.

He got out of bed and lifted the crying child with hands that were rough from his work. Garak balled his hands into small fists and beat Tolan around the shoulders as he was carried back to his bedroom. They walked past Mila’s room. She was still crying. The banging sounds were still happening. A deafening crash of thunder made Garak hide his face in the crook of Tolan’s neck.

His father placed him down on his bed where Garak continued to cry and begged not to be left.

Tolan still had the prayer mask in his other hand, and slipped it into bed with Garak, as though the boy should see that as some sort of comfort.

“Why can’t we help her?” Garak cried, sniffling and snuffling, his nose clogged up with snot. Tolan handed him a handkerchief.

“There is an order to things, Elim,” Tolan said, and he closed his eyes. Suddenly his father looked old, and very tired, “Mila and I are at the bottom,” he said, “we… have no choice but to submit ourselves to those who hold power over us.”

Tolan bent and briefly pressed his chufa to Garak’s. Garak pulled away from him, angry at his father’s answer, and feeling sick that his mother was being hurt by Uncle Tain in the room next to his.

Tolan left Garak alone with rain, the prayer mask, and the sick feeling in his tummy.

As Garak lay in the darkness his mind began to be haunted. If Tolan and Mila were at the bottom, that meant he was too. Would Uncle Tain come to his room one night, and hurt him? He already hurt him in other ways—did he deserve it for being ‘at the bottom’? Was that why he was punished for doing nothing wrong? Was that why his uncle so often locked him in the closet? But on the other hand, Tain wasn’t at the bottom. Tain was at the top, and for some reason, his uncle had an interest in him. Oh, Tain didn’t care for him, it was some other sort of interest that Garak didn’t quite understand. He had an interest in Garak’s development. He even made sure to have his own hand in that. If Garak listened to Tain, if he followed his directions, instead of listening to his father mumbling about religion, and gardening, would Garak stop being ‘on the bottom’ when he grew up?

Garak didn’t sleep.

He was to meet his father in the morning and go to work with him in the city, taking care of the trees that lined the main boulevard along which all the proud, mighty, government buildings sat.

But Garak skipped breakfast to avoid seeing his mother, and he skipped out on Tolan too.

He found Tain instead, sitting in his study with one of his riding hounds curled up at his feet. When Tain noticed Garak had entered the room, he looked up from something he was reading, and peered sternly at Garak.

_I told you to be silent! You should know by now that this is what you owe to me, servant._

Garak’s chest constricted upon that gaze, as the words and images from the night before flashed through his mind.

“Hello, Elim,” Tain said.

Garak had to try several times to speak before anything would come out of his mouth.

“Uncle Tain,” he finally said.

For months Tain had been telling Garak that listening to Tolan was a waste of time. Tain had been taking Garak on long walks through the garden, out into the desert, or through various places in the city. The walks weren’t meant for leisure. They were tests. Garak was meant to pay attention on these walks, and on the way back, Tain would quiz him relentlessly to try and get Garak to recall the most minute details from their little jaunts. Garak didn’t always pay attention and it costed him dearly in whatever punishment Tain saw fit. Often times that meant the closet.

“I… would like to go on a walk,” Garak said, “I’ll pay attention this time.”

Tain rose slowly from his chair, and made a soft noise to the dog, which sent it out of the room, and then he turned back to Garak.

“I knew that one day, Elim, you would see the value of what I have to teach to you,” Tain said.

Garak nodded, but he felt like a part of him was dead.

But as they exited the big house, and began to walk out towards the desert, Garak knew that this was how it had to be.

He didn’t want to stay on the bottom forever, and though he didn’t yet understand why, he knew that his Uncle Tain was a powerful man. While Garak loved gardening with his father, he knew now that he couldn’t allow himself to stay down in the dirt.


End file.
